Category: The Dish

Patrick Spaet argues that the Western obsession with work ethic strains credulity:

Our attitudes towards work are extremely schizophrenic: we secretly aspire to sloth, while we loudly praise work. There isn’t an election poster that doesn’t promise more jobs. The call for more work is similar to the Stockholm syndrome, in which the victims of hostage-taking eventually develop a positive relationship with their captors. We constantly hear the drivel of “growth,” “competition,” and “local prosperity,” to convince us that we have to “tighten our belts,” because only that way are “secure jobs” possible–while everything else presents “no alternative.” A wage increase isn’t in the cards, because otherwise the company will go broke. We can’t tax too much, because otherwise the job generators will go abroad. All of these things have become the consensus–even among the wage slaves themselves.

This situation is all the more schizophrenic in that we take every opportunity every day to escape toil and work: who voluntarily uses a washboard, if he has a washing machine? Who copies out a text by hand, if he can use a photocopier instead? And who mentally calculates the miserable columns of figures on his tax return, if he has a calculator? We are bone idle, and yet we glorify work. The Stockholm syndrome of work fetishism has befuddled our minds. It is the paradox of the present: the religion of work has attained the status of a state religion, at exactly the point in time when work is dying. The sale of labor power will be as promising in the 21st century as the sale of stagecoaches in the 20th century.

Spaet, who published a version of this piece in the German paper Die ZEIT over the summer, goes on to remark on the considerable debate it stirred:

Some commentators pointed out that a lot of work is unpaid as well as underappreciated, like housekeeping, care work, and parenting. Yes, it’s a shame that this work, which is mostly done by women, doesn’t get the credit it deserves. It’s a vicious result of the pervasive work fetish that holds that only paid work is valuable work.

Other commentators were quite hostile: “Nobody has a right to be lazy,” they argued. “Those who don’t work are doing harm to society. They are just social parasites.”

Well, this is a prime example of the work fetish. And commentators like this one overlook the fact that most existing jobs are bullshit jobs. As Henry David Thoreau put it: “Most men would feel insulted, if it were proposed to employ them in throwing stones over a wall, and then in throwing them back, merely that they might earn their wages. But many are no more worthily employed now.”

That’s the lesson Ferdinand Mount draws from Karen Armstrong’s Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence, citing her claim that every major faith tradition “has tracked the political entity in which it arose; none has become a ‘world religion’ without the patronage of a militarily powerful empire and every tradition would have to develop an imperial ideology”:

The conversion of Constantine also meant the conscription of Christianity. It was not long before Augustine of Hippo was developing the convenient theory of the ‘just war’. Similarly the ahadith, the later reports of the Prophet’s sayings, confer a spiritual dimension on warfare which it doesn’t have in the Koran. Militant Sikhs today prefer to quote the martial teachings of the Tenth Guru rather than those of their founder Guru Nanak, who taught that only ‘he who regards all men as equals is religious’.

Christopher Hitchens had it the wrong way round in his subtitle to God is Not Great. It should have been, not ‘How Religion Poisons Everything’ but ‘How Everything Poisons Religion’. This is the misunderstanding which drives fanatical secularists to demand that faith be driven out of the public square and permanently banned from re-entry, like a drunk from the pub he always picks a fight in.

The demand was first heard in the 17th century from Hobbes and Locke, and it became an article of faith for the American revolutionaries. Jefferson believed that Church and State had proved ‘a loathsome combination’, and he was determined to build a ‘wall of separation’ between them. What he could not foresee was that nationalism would effortlessly take over the mantle of self-righteousness, and the apocalyptic language too. Within 60 years, the first explicitly non-sectarian republic exploded in the most modern and deadly civil war, its cause immortalised by the rhetoric of the non-religious Abraham Lincoln.

In an essay drawing from her book, Armstrong emphasizes one aspect of her argument in particular – that the modern understanding of religion as a distinctly private pursuit is not the historical norm:

Before the modern period, religion was not a separate activity, hermetically sealed off from all others; rather, it permeated all human undertakings, including economics, state-building, politics and warfare. Before 1700, it would have been impossible for people to say where, for example, “politics” ended and “religion” began. The Crusades were certainly inspired by religious passion but they were also deeply political: Pope Urban II let the knights of Christendom loose on the Muslim world to extend the power of the church eastwards and create a papal monarchy that would control Christian Europe. The Spanish inquisition was a deeply flawed attempt to secure the internal order of Spain after a divisive civil war, at a time when the nation feared an imminent attack by the Ottoman empire. Similarly, the European wars of religion and the thirty years war were certainly exacerbated by the sectarian quarrels of Protestants and Catholics, but their violence reflected the birth pangs of the modern nation-state.

Noel Malcolm, however, questions Armstrong’s reliance on this amorphous understanding of what religion really is:

Writing about ancient Persia, she declares that “a religious tradition is never a single, unchanging essence; it is a template that can be modified and altered radically to serve a variety of ends”. That sounds reasonable enough, but then she makes a much bolder claim. Until about 1700, she says, people were simply unable to distinguish between religious issues and political, social or economic ones. There was no such separate thing as religion. Ergo, it is wrong to single out “religion” as something to blame.

If that were true, it would also mean that you can’t single out religion as something to excuse, or at least partly exonerate. But when she discusses medieval Christian anti-Semitism, for example, Armstrong is quick to say that not only “religious conviction” but also “social, political and economic elements” were to blame. The violence of the Spanish Inquisition, likewise, “was caused less by theological than political considerations”. What was all that about it being impossible to distinguish religious issues from non-religious ones?

Recent Dish on Armstrong’s book here.

(Photo of a bronze statue of Constantine by Gernot Keller)